A few points to ponder... (yes, sigh, edited for readability...) Microsoft, decades ago, established that their view of the future was one where the Internet will be used as a single shared computing resource. Applications would either run completely in, or your computer would pass computing tasks to, the "cloud" (we'll use a more modern interpretation of their explanations), and other "cloud" connected computers running a Microsoft OS and Microsoft applications would split the task and provide your computer results, faster than your individual computing resource could be capable of. That you may be leasing, not owning. New OS and application functions would frequently added, that would bridge local resources and "cloud" resources. Take a very close look at Microsoft365's suite of offerings to see where they went, where they are, and where they may be going. Microsoft intended the Public Cloud to literally be. Windows 10 itself has increasingly been more cloud connected with each iteration. It is likely that some degree of this progressive iteration would show up in the next "version" of the Windows OS. Barring ISP changes, though, Microsoft's vision is limited by current Internet connectivity realities, such as bandwidth and latency, and costs. It would be interesting to hear @croberts68 and Tony Zurovec's thoughts on such a concept as shared computing resources, applied to Star Citizen... Microsoft has stated that backwards compatibility of applications is always desired, but may not be an absolute; they are more concerned with maintaining compatibility with user-created documents and the content itself. The key to understanding application (and by extension, game) compatibility, is to watch what Microsoft does with memory management and 32/64-bit translation functions. If they completely drop the translation bloat, then everything ever written is likely going to have to be rewritten or recompiled. This, more than anything, may impact Star Citizen (and all of the applications people use related to their peripherals). Well, unless Intel and AMD make a major change... To illustrate; when Microsoft messes with OS/Application memory management... very bad (completely unpredictable) things happen. The best example of this was when they went from an MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 system, to Windows 95; they made changes right after their second Release Candidate was sent to their partners, that they never informed anyone of. Program variables that were previously automatically initialized, were silently no longer automatically initialized; random values were suddenly causing random failures at random locations when run on Windows 95. Until Microsoft admitted they made a memory management change, developers spent months hunting random bugs. Now, Microsoft has been busy porting a major toolset (PowerShell) to various flavors of Linux, since Bill Gates stepped aside. Further, Microsoft has officially ported Microsoft SQL Server to Linux, which is a major signal that Microsoft is serious about Linux and there to stay. So... anything is possible. The next version of Windows may wind up completely abandoning the existing code base. Which will impact both every PC on the planet, as well as everything they are doing on the XBox. Star Citizen is not currently supported on Linux... but if Microsoft makes major movement towards that code base... ALL of their developers must follow suit. Time will reveal all things. Another interesting point to ponder... and eventually ask Chris Roberts, will be how cloud gaming will impact Star Citizen officially in the future. Will CIG allow Star Citizen to be tested/played in fully could-connected environments, or will they take the route of some other developers, who placed, and enforce, anti-cloud gaming provisions in their Terms of Service? Right now, many players use cloud gaming services to run Star Citizen; it's a question that hasn't been asked, but one that is likely to receive an answer, eventually.